Good News! Humans Can Flourish: Recommended Reading

Briggs, A., & Reiss, M. J. (2021). Human Flourishing: Scientific Insight and Spiritual Wisdom in Uncertain Times. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Haidt, J. (2006). The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. New York: Basic Books.

Waldinger, R., & Schulz, M. (2023). The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Study on Happiness. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Good news. It is possible for human beings to flourish. Now there are lots of examples of how people are figuring this out. To measure how well someone is doing, Andrew Briggs and Michael Reiss propose we look at the material, relational, and transcendent dimensions of the human experience. Their book explores what we know today, from research and practice about what these three dimensions are, how they show up in human life, the great diversity of ways people express them, and how they all three contribute to a life well lived. It is not about achieving a high level of one of them, but rather the coherence in all three of them.

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explores ancient wisdom and modern research to see what causes this flourishing for humans, what gets in the way of flourishing, which of those obstacles are self-inflicted, and how we might take ancient wisdom and apply it to our lives today. In our thinking, in our social relationships, in the purpose that organizes our lives, and in how we develop the capacities we need to flourish along the way.

Directors of an 85-year study of the lives of 2,000 people, covering three generations in the same families, Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz tease out the biological, psychological, and sociological factors that most determine a good life, as determined by the participants, over a long life. While many factors affect one’s experience and choice of a good life, their study shows that strong relationships are the most fundamental predictor. Your intimate partner, family, close friends, work colleagues, and neighbors. They all contribute to your “social fitness.”

This is exciting terrain, into which I too have jumped. I am part of four large-scale efforts to describe human flourishing. The Harvard-Baylor-Gallup-COS Global Flourishing Study looks at the conditions affecting the flourishing of 240,000 people in 22 countries over 5 years, where my teams will be looking at the “close social relationships” across the globe, as well as all of the questions for Mexico and Spain. At Harvard’s Center for Work, Health, & Well-being, we are looking at what drives the level of thriving of workers and how that influences enterprise-level outcomes. In the Global Initiative to Map Ecosynomic Deviance and Impact Resilience, the Institute for Strategic Clarity is using (1) the Agreements Health Check survey to identify the positive deviants who are experiencing high levels of human flourishing across the globe, having already surveyed 132,000 groups in 126 countries, as well as (2) a longitudinal dataset across the ecosystem of a large microfinance bank to measure the total value generated across an organization’s ecosystem. And, through the Harvard-Oxford Leadership for Flourishing initiative, we are assessing the characteristics of leadership for flourishing and how it manifests across a wide variety of organizations, and we have proposed the Global Flourishing Goals for the UN Agenda 2050, which will be publicly presented in May 2023 by UNESCO’s Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development.

Why Human Flourishing Should Be The Purpose of An Economy: Humanity 2.0

Are you better off today than yesterday? Physically, emotionally, socially, mentally, ethically? Because of your interactions with others? Many people say they are better off after a good workout or times with good friends and family. What about after a day at work?

What is the role of leadership for flourishing? Should flourishing be something we consider in our work life? My colleagues in Harvard’s Center for Work, Health, & Well-being, where I am a department associate, are discovering the elements of the work environment that lead to thriving experiences for workers.

Humanity 2.0 and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, with the Harvard Human Flourishing Program, where I am a research affiliate, invited me to give a talk this past November at the 2022 Human Flourishing Forum in the Vatican addressing the question of why human flourishing should be the purpose of an economy. You can see the talk by clicking on the link below.

Basically, I suggest that when we take human flourishing into account in our human interactions, we see greater engagement and better results, throughout the ecosystem of your organization. When we do not consider the whole-human experience, we see lower engagement, massive energy loss, and thus worse results. It is that simple. I show how we can measure this.

I invite you to see the other talks by my colleagues Matthew Lee, Brian Wellinghoff, and Katy Granville-Chapman, as well as Fr. Ezra Sullivan, and Jonathan Lever, as well as panels on each theme. I am grateful for this experience, seeing how to accelerate what is possible for humanity.

Varieties of Vitality: Recommended Reading

Lomas, T., J. Ritchie-Dunham, M.T. Lee, T.J. VanderWeele. (2022). “The Varieties of Vitality: A Cross-cultural Lexical Analysis.” International Journal of Wellbeing 12(4): 155-180.

Your own vitality. It is yours. You are able to experience many more ways of vitality than your own language can describe. People across the globe have discovered many of these ways, describable only in their own language, untranslatable in your own. And, you can experience them.

In this just-published article with Dr Tim Lomas, Matthew T. Lee, and Tyler VanderWeele, we explore how many of these untranslatable ways might fit together to paint a richer mosaic available to all of us.

Bleak or Promising? Gallup’s 2022 State of the Global Workplace Findings

“Do employees find their work meaningful and rewarding? Do they think their lives are going well? Do they feel hopeful about the future? The short answer is that most employees around the world would answer “no” to all three questions.” [Gallup’s 2022 State of the Global Workplace Report].

Whether this is bleak news or promising news depends on that one key word, “MOST.” From the positive-deviant perspective, that not all of the people have this experience means that some ARE engaged, and feel that their work is meaningful and rewarding. They feel their lives are going well, and they are hopeful about the future. This aligns with my current research where we have found thousands of groups living this way, every day, all over the world.

While this is not good news for the 79% of the workers not engaged at work, we now have a way of (1) finding people who are engaged at work, and (2) we can begin to learn with them about what drives their engagement. These engaged people work in the same geographies, in the same industries, and often in the same large companies as the disengaged people. We can study what makes them different, within the same or very similar circumstances. Our research suggests a key difference is in how they agree, consciously and unconsciously, to interact, which we can measure with the field of their agreements.

I see this as inspiring news. We have found a way to identify people who are figuring out how to live the way more of us want to live, in the same circumstances we live in, and we have found a way to learn with them. Two weeks ago I shared recent studies highlighting some of these initial findings.

Insights on Human Flourishing Are Flourishing

Lots of insights on human flourishing. While people everywhere, for a very long time, have explored what it is to be human and what it is to live successfully as a human, lots of recent work is exploring what it means for us around today, all over the planet.

Here is a small sample of recent work that I know of from my own networks. You can share in the comments where you see flourishing insights coming up as well.

• A Systems Perspective on Human Flourishing Within and Across Countries [Höltge, J., et al., Journal of Positive Psychology, 2022]
• Introducing FlourishFM!: A Podcast for the Good Life [Jon Beale and Nick Holton, June 28, 2022]
• The Long Win: The Search for a Better Way to Succeed, with Cath Bishop [VoiceAmerica Radio, Business Elevation Show with Chris Cooper, June 24, 2022]
• Living a Life of Possibility [John Kesler, IPP Institute, June 21, 2022]
• Global Social Leaders, Global Goals Competition 2021/2022 Winner Announcement [Global Social Leaders, June 17, 2022]
• How Can We Learn About Human Flourishing from Research? [Tyler VanderWeele, Psychology Today, April 27, 2022]
• How Americans are Fighting Back Against the Forces that Manipulate and Divide Us [Jillian Youngblood and Brandyn Keating, USA Today, April 23, 2022]
• Beyond Happiness: The Role of Life Satisfaction in Human Flourishing [Tyler VanderWeele, Psychology Today, February 17, 2022]
• Leadership, Flourishing & the ‘Big Yes’ [Katy Granville-Chapman with Jim Ritchie-Dunham, Global Social Leaders, February 3, 2022]
• Human Flourishing: A Conceptual Analysis [Eri Mountbatten-O’Malley, Doctoral Thesis, January 17, 2022]
• How Could School Leaders Improve the Flourishing of Teaching Staff? [Katy Granville-Chapman, DPhil Thesis, 2021]
• The Other Side of Languishing Is Flourishing. Here’s How to Get There [Dani Blum, New York Times, May 4, 2021]

Flourishing from Work: Good or Bad for Business? For You?: Recommended Readings

Clifton, J. and J. Harter (2021). Wellbeing at Work: How to Build Resilient and Thriving Teams. New York, Gallup Press. Dig in a little deeper here.

Pirson, M. (2017). Humanistic Management : Protecting Dignity and Promoting Well-being. New York, Cambridge University Press.

Pope Francis (2015). Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’ of The Holy Father Francis on Care for Our Common Home. Città del Vaticano, Libreria Editrice Vaticana.

Sisodia, R. and M. J. Gelb (2019). The Healing Organization: Awakening the Conscience of Business to Help Save the World. New York, HarperCollins Leadership.

Wiener, N. (1954). The Human Use of Human Beings. Cambridge, MA, Da Capo Press.

Can you flourish from work? Because of work? Is flourishing from work good for business? Or is it bad for business? What about for you?

While a lot of people are talking about flourishing at work today, there is no consensus. Many people think it is either (1) inefficient to bring feelings and vulnerability into the rational process of efficiently converting inputs into outputs someone will value, or (2) it is just plain dangerous to do so. And, there is growing evidence that flourishing at work leads to flourishing in life. So, what is flourishing at work, and how does that flourishing impact business results? These five books address these questions, providing many case studies and lots of data, from across the globe on what flourishing is, how high-performing organizations are evolving their capacity for flourishing at work, and why this is required to address some of humanity’s large-scale issues. Let’s explore the five books, briefly, by alphabetical order of the authors.

Clifton and Harter synthesize lots of data gathered recently by the Gallup organization, looking at their five elements of wellbeing (career, social, financial, physical, community), with chapters dedicated to lots of data and examples about what healthier and higher performance looks like. They also frame four risks of NOT creating a net-thriving culture, as well as provide a roadmap for you to take on your own net thriving. Very accessible.

Pirson interweaves scholarly research in business with classic philosophy to build a framework for thinking about a more humanistic management, putting human dignity and well-being at the core of business practice and research. For those seeking to frame why and how they are proposing more humanistic ways to manage their business, Pirson provides an entry way to that logic, peppered with references to robust thinking about why and how a humanistic approach is more powerful.

Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical Lauato Si’ puts the flourishing human being, in community, at the center of the process for dealing with massive issues in our common home, our living earth. Our current choices are damaging this common home, which is causing a decline in the quality of human life and the breakdown of society. There is another path, of creativity, collaboration, and dialog. The consequences of flourishing from our organizations might be our capacity to creatively collaborate on addressing these massive challenges to our common home.

Sisodia and Gelb find that not only can people flourish at work, how we come together can actually be healing. Healing individually and as groups. Across companies and communities. They provide many examples of groups that are thriving and having huge impact, through their healing processes at work.

In his classic piece, Wiener shows how understanding humans as living feedback systems emboldens how organizations and society might engage them. People are more “patterns that perpetuate themselves” than “stuff that abides,” capable of extending themselves through their attention and intention into greater-than-self purposes. While quite technical and theoretical, at the founding of cybernetics, Wiener provides solid and simple frameworks to remember that people are amazing, evolving beings, and using them as cogs in a machine is a huge waste.

From the very practical to the very theoretical, from the very grounded to the very spiritual, these five books suggest that we humans can indeed flourish from work, and that human flourishing is good for business and good for you.

Leadership for Flourishing

Reimagine leadership as empowering human flourishing. A group of us have come together, from across the globe, to work on this. Human flourishing, leadership, character, and actual impact.

How do these elements fit together? Do people who figure this out and practice this every day do better? These are the questions we are asking. Find out more about how by visiting us at https://www.leadershipforflourishing.com.

You can also see an overview of this emerging thinking in the free online “Leadership for Flourishing” course offered by our colleagues at the Oxford Character Project and the Harvard Human Flourishing Program.

Want a Daily Practice for Thriving?

For thousands of years, people across the planet, everywhere, have founds ways to thrive. Within their local context, they have learned how to live a good life, a life well lived. They have learned how to see what is actually happening, with an ever-expanding embrace of reality and how they want to engage in it. In today’s modern world, many of these practices from other cultures, other places, and other times are presented as modern solutions. You might find that some of them work for you. It is mostly about trying it, keeping at it, and seeing what it does.

A practice for thriving designed for today’s contemplative practitioner is the Integral Polarity Practice (IPP). Building on wisdom traditions, with modern practitioners in mind, it works with transcending polarities–seeming opposites, often pulling in different directions–to bring more of your own creative Yes! to the world. Developed by my colleague John Kesler over many years, IPP supports your development and integration of stages of awareness, what some call “growing up,” and states of awareness, also called “waking up.” This practice is directly applicable to your own development, to your relationships, and to your organizations.

Flourishing at Work

According to a recent Gallup study, “Only 15% of the world’s one billion full-time workers are engaged at work.” 85% are not! How did this happen?

What can we do about it? My colleague Tyler VanderWeele, professor and Director of the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University, shares his recent research on flourishing at work in a January 27, 2021 post in Psychology Today. “Most people want to be engaged at work. The time passes more quickly, and the activities seem more fun. But engaged and satisfied employees are also good for business: they are more productive, less likely to leave the company, and less likely to waste time on the job. Engagement can have a major impact on costs, revenues, and profit.”

The mainstream is starting to pay attention to this. In a December 2020 HBR podcast, Christina Maslach, professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley talks about “why burnout happens and how bosses can help. In November 202, the VisualCapitalist provided an infographic of “15 Warning Signs to Identify a Toxic Work Environment Before Taking a Job.” It is no longer rocket science or “that soft stuff.” The numbers are huge, and the costs are very real.

We need to realize that, as human beings, we are each uniquely constituted and contextualized, and therefore we are each uniquely engaged or disengaged. This means that to address engagement–flourishing at work–we need to inquire into each person’s context. We need to ask, listen, and try something, together. While this might seem expensive to do for each person, Tyler’s study showed that the costs of not doing so are far greater. Once we see that the costs of scarcity are far, far greater than the costs of abundance, the investment in Yes!, then we will start to make progress, creating thriving, regenerative organizations and communities. These authors are paving the way.